2017

Goals in 2017

The year is over, a new year has come.

I know, New Year is an arbitrary point in time but it is a tradition to look back on the past year and have some resolutions for the year to come.

So at this arbitrary point in time, lets look back and forward

2016

I’m going to make this short, because I mostly want to look forward!

  • Became an independent software consultant
  • Bought a house with my girlfriend
  • Read lots of books
  • Became a teamleader
  • Lots of other cool stuff

2017

Last month I read Building Jarvis from Mark Zuckerberg where he builds himself a Jarvis in 100 hours. I was, and still am, in awe. This looks like an awesome project and it was done in about 100 hours.

So I was thinking, last year, I had a goal of reading 30 books but I read way more 46. This year I’m setting my goal lower because I kind of felt a pressure to read books. Even if it was without an underlying goal. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to read this much books and I’m going to try to keep reading a lot, but reading much isn’t the goal. For me learning, recreation, relaxation are better goals. And reading books is absolutely not the only way to learn. Moreover it’s not the only way that I try to learn at the moment, but I believe my focus was a not alwasy correct, so that’s why I’m setting different goals this year.

Concrete goals:

  • Last year, I built lots of small things. This year, I want to build a concrete side project, put a time limit to it and finish it. 100 hours? 8 hours each month?. The side project should allow me to learn some of the stuff that I’m interested in.
  • Read 20 books (reading still is fun and a great way to learn)
  • Read and understand 10 papers (1 each month)
  • Write 6 blog posts

The books should be easy, the side project will probably be the hardest!

Learn stuff that I’m interested in

So what will the project be? I don’t know yet, but ideally, it should include some of the things that I’m interested in at the moment:

(In no specific order)

  • Machine learning and AI, natural language processing, neural networks,….
  • Virtual reality
  • Event sourcing and DDD
  • Complex systems
  • Functional programming
  • Static typing (ML) languages
  • Frontend functional programming languages and UX
  • Product design, let’s restate this: Building great products
  • Actor model - Erlang/Elixir
  • Mobile apps

There are way more things that I’m interested in, but this list is way too long already. So lets start with it!

Languages I’m watching:

To complete, here are some of the languages that I’m watching at the moment.

  • Elixir
  • Elm
  • Purescript
  • Haskell
  • Typescript

Watching means, at least try to write code in them or improve at these languages.

Have a great 2017!

Thomas Coopman

Software Consultant